If there is one thing I loved in Starcraft it was hearing "SCV good to go, sir!" and I was just BAM right back at my base clicking madly to select it from the crowd and get it to the exact right mineral patch. Maybe you're a noob, but I'd personally manage every single trip on those guys. This is why I had to switch to Actions Per Second rather than Action Per Minute, because when I have 50 SCVs out, it gets intense and I cannot count that high. Why 50 SCVs? Because then I get an insane collection rate, and no, there is no overlap or delay, because I know how to properly manage my units.

Then Blizzard ruined everything by chasing the "casual gamer" demographic, which is just another word for worthless noobs. Sort of like immigrants, except immigrants cannot be farmed for easy early ranking. I call that bootstrapping. Anyway, the specific change is that now a command center can have a rally point set to a resource and the SCV will just gather it, right out of the box. Of course it's still not quite as good as my micromanagement, but it's still a step too far. For the record, any steps are too far. If anything, I think rally points should have been eliminated altogether. It is ridiculous that noobs can just click and click and now units go somewhere. Back in my day they drove out of the factory and they sat there, waiting, doing absolutely nothing, until I manually clicked to move them to the enemy base, at which point they'd be wiped out by rocket infantry.

We called it gaming.

But it gets worse. Back in the day there were medics and they had a short range and were properly vulnerable to zerglings, siege tanks, and broodling spawn. Now there are medivacs which can just fly around like everything is fine and wonderful. FLYING HEALERS! It is my belief that healers should be nearly immobile and highly vulnerable to enemy fire. These days the noobs can just load infantry into a medivac, drop them, and they're getting healed right away. Psh. Unload all? NOOB COMMAND. Good players would individually click to make sure the unload order is just right. Of course just to be sure I also individually load them, to be sure they if I have a seizure and accidentally hit unload all, that they come out in the right order.

It's called a backup plan and it's what smart people do.

Even unit composition has gone down the drain. Count your medics, divvy them up among the groups, keep them moving along with the marines, with stopping when healing was needed. Don't let them get stuck so far behind they they cannot heal the guy in the front who charged a pair of photon cannons. It was all about the tactical skill.

But who am I kidding? Blizzard ruined it all right out of the box. In Command and Conquer a dead grenadier would explode, causing huge friendly damage. You had to spread those guys out, or, use them as suicide bombers. Do firebats explode? Sure, kinda. But do they slaughter the marines around them? No! It's so stupid. Of course Brood Wars just made it worse. Stim packs used to be a careful decision. They'd fight better, but be permanently wounded. Now it's like "oh, I have a medic, I should just spam stim packs" and now these noobs are all spamming stim packs. Even worse, you can use stim packs in bunkers. A real player would unload, stim, jump back in. You know, playing the game.

I've also heard horrible rumors that SCVs can be set to auto-repair. I haven't tested this yet because I refuse to bow to the noobs. But that is outrageous. Auto-repair? Auto? The only thing that should be auto is the gun my marine is using! Back in my day we'd carefully separate out our returning Wraith flights to get all the damaged in one place for easier repair. Of course any good gamer knows I just made that up, because if they aren't all damaged, it's because I gave up too soon.

One last thing: Last Replay. Can you believe SC2 just saves replays? Just like that. Play a game and you have a replay. Back in my day we had to manually save those things. The best we got was the ability to watch the last game, and that's it.

We called it remembering what we were doing.

I could draw out, unit for unit, along with mineral counts (within 5, let's not get crazy), every second of my games, from memory. Why? Because I pay attention during my games. Now the noobs are just pressing buttons and hoping they get pretty explosions rather than performing detailed pre-post-mid-half-re-game analysis.

"Sort of like immigrants, except immigrants cannot be farmed for easy early ranking."

I am an immigrant from Ukraine, five years in Canada. I can compare the intellects of immigrants and locals...I don't know what happents to people through generations in Northern Amerika, but they defenitely are worthenning with time. I am operating in my second language away more succesfull in my studies than average damn locals.This is like a sience fiction story about degenerating the starship crew: each new generation is worth and worth. I believe all of that sience fiction stories were written by Europian emmigrants to Amerika (like Stanislav Lem), and they just described the American reality...